Nirvana, ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ (1993)

Nirvana’s final studio album, In Utero, desperately wants not to be beautiful. Yet despite the dissonant chord squalls, the bipolar production and a song called “Rape Me,” it can’t break free of Kurt Cobain’s gift for soaring, structured, pretty pop  and in this tension lies its genius. A similar friction buzzes in Anton Corbijn’s clip for the record’s lead single, “Heart-Shaped Box.” Imagining a Grimms-on-LSD poppy field frequented by an emaciated man on a cross, a hulking angel and a little girl skipping around in a Ku Klux Klan outfit, it has the jagged contours and startled innocence of a wise child’s nightmare. It’s beautiful and it’s terrible. And the video’s most unnervingly gorgeous element is also its simplest: Cobain singing the third verse and chorus straight to the camera, his eyes beaming deep-blue orbs powerful enough to crack the lens.